Roman Vishniac was born in August 1897 near St Petersburg, Russia and was brought up in Moscow.

After the Russian Revolution the Vishniac family moved to Berlin.

In the years before World War II, Roman Vishniac travelled across Eastern Europe with his camera and captured images of Jewish life, which turned out to be one of the final records of many communities.

Between 1936 and 1939 Roman Vishniac travelled through the Jewish settlements of the Carpathian Ruthenia, Slovakia and Poland before they were torn asunder by the Nazis. He took thousands of evocative photographs.

Many of Vishniac's photographs were collected in a work called A Vanished World.